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That was an impressive screed, but you haven't connected a single thing to "male avarice" and female emancipation. And you're doing exactly what you claimed you aren't, telling a just so story about how Christianity is the only ideology that somehow avoids the failure mode of every other civilization.
Are we in the End Times? I've been hearing that in one form or another since I was a kid. A pity that we (or at least I) am too old to see it through or I would put up money on you being wrong.
"Now, sure, every time in the last 200 years that a nation declared itself as enlightened atheists guided by pure reason they immediately proceeded with the worst atrocities yet visited upon man, but hey, what's religion got to do with anything?"
You're better than this response, not least of all because your challenges were answered and you missed it in your haste to throw down the "tl;dr lol."
Avarice is self-evidently ruinous. Caprice was explained at the top:
Left to their own devices, the majority will choose serial fleeting satisfactions rather than the long-term happiness that comes in continuing the human race by creating more people. This is capriciousness.
I do agree my jab at the end was hyperbole, but it's because my timeframe is right. Simulacra will reach ubiquity before "Generation Supercritical" reaches the age of majority and adopts them in mass. As for you calling this doomsaying, I'm deathly serious about my concerns, I don't see the flaw and I think about this constantly. If you do, if you think you have a superior understanding, if you see how we get out of this mess of young people seeing no purpose in life, especially when automation comes for everything, I'm all ears. I want to be wrong, I would want you to be right, because then all posterity doesn't hinge on this one achievement.
Which non-communist countries would these be? Because I think the single unifying trait you are ignoring here is communism.
My response was not "tl;dr lol." You did not answer my challenges, you just keep insisting that Rome and China and the Weimar republic all fell for reasons they did not.
Sure, but I could name a bunch of other ruinous traits also easily found in most countries in decline. This argument is specifically about whether it's control of women (or lack thereof) that is a unifying thread. You mentioned automation. I could mention that and a host of other economic, technological, and tribal concerns that probably figure much more prominently in any potential societal collapse than the "mistake" of letting women have sexual agency.
France.
Definitionally atheist communism, yes. I observed nothing about China's fall, I said the worst of them all was the nation that never had Christianity to discard. This is a fact. Weimar, and especially Rome, you can't just say "Wrong." Not here.
What do I make of every one of your responses being a mix of snide quips and "Nuh-uh"? I would make that you have personal and significant emotional investment in my assessment being wrong.
Same, mostly. I would be happy to be wrong. I don't care about these things. I want my mental model of the world to align with with the world. I have no personal investment in the actual "why" of the fall of Rome or Weimar Germany or even the decline of America. I'm American, so it affects me and I am personally invested in it stopping, but I don't attach moral significance to any particular interpretation of the decline. If it turned out the problem was in fact women's liberation not going far enough, then that's the truth. It's what I'd want it to be, mostly, I would have an ethical problem with any attempt to empirically justify abortions, but if "sexual agency" is not just a euphemism for the freedom to make terrible decisions and can actually be quantified as beneficial, then once again, that's the truth, and I'll heed it. I dislike being incorrect, if my paradigm is wrong and my interpretation for why we're in decline is wrong, then I will change them, but you gotta show me why.
I'll go a little more on this in the next paragraph but I want to take a moment to be clear. I'd resent any implication of misogyny, and you haven't done that one bit, but for anyone else reading. I truly love women and I don't mean this as the cad. I'm a guy and there are big expectations on me but none of them will ever be as important as giving birth. The woman has immediate existential value, but in that, she is predefined. She has an easier time of it because, as with almost all of them, the only mark she'll leave on the world is her children. This is true for men but not true in the same way. It's not our bodies getting pregnant, it's not our certainty of pain and risk of injury and death. It's not that the reason we exist might be exactly what kills us. The angst and the implicit body horror must be profound, especially in this paradox of it being bound with the most wonderful and beautiful thing; the maybe singular yet perfect example of something a person can't understand in theory but only if they face it. The ideal would be that sex could just be for fun, that permanent bonding was voluntary, that pregnancies were always safe and could only occur when they were wanted. The ideal would be liberation--what we've done isn't that. What we've done is pretty God-damned far from liberation.
Rome. I may be overemphasizing in saying it was the singular cause, but I am not wrong that it was a major contributing factor. Between the work of Walter Scheidel, Mary Beard, and Kyle Harper the declining birthrate can be concluded as a ranking culprit. Scheidel has the numbers of how high the mortality rates were and how women had to have a lot of children just to keep the population static. Beard, and what I said above I return to here, talks about what it meant to be a woman in Rome, what it meant to become pregnant. Every time she was risking death, and the risk was high. 1 in 50 births overall, for an individual woman, about a 1 in 10 chance she dies during childbirth. Is there any wonder she would want things different?
Harper talks about birth rates, his work is seminal, all future study should incorporate it, as he considers disease and weather. What happens when a population with underdeveloped immune systems gets hit with plague? They die. What happened in Roman history? Plague at three key junctures, or perhaps plague that made three key junctures. Except we know stable societies not only tolerate plagues, they bounce back and flourish. Assuming it doesn't wipe them out as it did in South America, but it didn't in Rome. Unoccupied land there for the taking, the demand for laborers rising and their pay and treatment improving, the political structures weakened and allowing reforms. Renaissance followed the Black Death. Rome wasn't ended by plagues because they were that bad, Rome was already weak and plagues finished them off. What made them weak? Not enough people. Even the authors who know how many mothers died in childbirth fail to observe "Well they had the choice not to, of course they took it; thus went Rome."
I condemn Weimar Germany for their last depravities. I assign no moral condemnation to Rome. Caprice is a charged word so I can't claim I've spoken on this with clinical detachment, but I've tried, and maybe failed anyway, to use language that indicates my slant. I hate the conditions that cause these choices, not the individuals who make them.
A Roman woman who had just one child and didn't want to risk death by having a second, who could find blame in her? Of the civilizations that allow women to make that choice, yes maybe they fall, but isn't that a worthy reason? Said another way, if I'm right about how societies that don't control women -- that don't force women to have babies over and over until they have enough or die -- will inevitably collapse, those societies would be completely right to refuse that control, and noble if they did so knowing what it would cost. Today, today, what do we do about the pandemic today of bastard and layabout men? Who could say today it's worth forcing women to stay with and give a half-dozen kids to men who treat them right at first only to become monsters 5 or 10 years into marriage? It's important to say this is not the rule, it's important to say this is presented as commonplace in no small reason because fearmongering is politically useful, when most men, most people, are good, or good enough. But America alone has more than 350 million people, and a percent of a percent is an unacceptable number. What do we do? The woman can divorce him, then what? Take her kids and carry on with their life-sized baggage? Does she risk that, or does she live the only way she knows, the way society today encourages, periodically coupling, while hoping to find the love of her life, eventually. Of course she'd choose the second! When those are the choices? Shit sucks, it's that simple, it just sucks.
I want this to be the better way, not being cavalier about sex, but at least not rushing to marriage, having several relationships so you can learn, or nowadays, so men and women have enough time to learn the qualities of their partners and what's best for each before they commit to each other for life so they can make more humans. I want it to be, because for the most part, this is the better way. But I can't disregard the facts in front of me just because they would mean the world is a darker place. Whatever kind of world we live in, that is the world, it doesn't change by how we feel about it, it changes when we know the truth, because it's only from the truth that we can do something about it.
Okay, initially I wrote a rather harsher response, because the combination of projection ("You are being snide! You are responding with Nuh-uhs!") and the old "emotional investment" gambit (a low class tactic usually seen in forums where going to straight to ad hominems is the norm - "Huh huh you are arguing with me, you must be emotional about this! Like a woman!") annoyed me. However, from your lengthier reply I think you are arguing in good faith and deserve a kinder response. So, just to make a few points in order:
If you are referring to Revolutionary France, that was more than 200 years ago. 200 years was your criteria, hence my confusion.
A common tactic I see, usually from Christians, is to accuse atheism of being responsible for the mass atrocities of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et al, when the defining feature of communist dictatorships was communism. State enforced prohibitions or control of religion are just one aspect of communism. It's not the atheism that is their ideological driving force, it's the Marxism. (Indeed, I would argue China never really became "atheist" in a real sense. They just replaced Confucianism with Maoism.)
I still disagree about Rome and the Weimar Republic, and I think you haven't really brought much evidence to bear that "control of women" was the defining or even most significant failure leading to their collapse. Even you back down a bit from that proposition, merely citing it as a contributing factor.
Yes, I am kind of personally invested in my society not collapsing, but I don't think I am just ignoring evidence that it is. I just think we are on a long slow decline for a lot of reasons, not a rapid collapse that is happening because of modern hypergamy and male avarice.
To address your broader meta point: no, I am not going to accuse you of being personally misogynistic. But anyone proposing something like "Women must be controlled or their sexuality will destroy society" has to grapple with the essential misogyny of that position. You can bite the bullet and say "Yes, for the good of the species, women must be treated as property." You can propose social guardrails (like Christianity) that hopefully will constrain them in a less brutal fashion. You can argue against the premise (I am far from sold on it). Or you can go full blackpill and say "Who cares what women feel, they aren't even people." (Not hyperbole, that is more or less the position we have actually seen a handful of people take here over the years.) But a lot of this talk about how women being able to choose and the feminization of society seems to just complete lack any empathy at all for the position of a (female) person being told to accept a society where she has little or no say in who gets to fuck her and when and whether she will be impregnated. That's stating it in its bluntest terms, but it's hard to dismiss the hysteria of of women wearing Handmaid's Tale cosplay at protests when they can actually see men who really are proposing what they fear. For those who are honest and say "Yes chad" to that, okay, points for being forthright about it, but you don't get to sneer at feminist arguments anymore, because they are actually right about your intentions.
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